This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.

This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.

Welcome to American Hustle.. Like most sore winners we strut and take too much for granted - particularly our own citizens. Too bad we lost sight of our core values in the process of our financial dominance and success. American values flourish on a level playing field, in an inclusive meritocracy, but now we're back to royal assholes playing king of the hill. Perhaps dominance is more Sisyphus' crushing refrain. Human nature rears its ugly head in any golden age.
Lets start with the obvious : Let's

At what point does something convenient and free like iMessages become a mandatory expectation across all devices known to man? Why not say Microsoft MUST make it's Office suite run on my PS4 or on my iPad...sue sue sue until they do it because it's their fault. [/sarcasm] Seriously, everyone needs to stop suing for everything.

This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.

Not really. "Into trouble" usually means a write-off fine and a sullied name for the length of Joe sixpack's attention span (a few weeks or months depending on whether the news oligopolies relationship with their corporate Goliath sponsors.)

Also, you forgot some, Employers that make it difficult for employees to switch careers and health-care companies who leverage pre-existing conditions to prevent customers from seeking competing alternatives. Political parties who shoehorn 300 million people into two points of view. The fact that Americans have come to accept monopolies in most aspects of their lives means they can't even see them or the problems they cause anymore. Apple isn't seen as a monopoly or even as an anti-competive corporate Goliath. Apple is seen as a "personal choice" or religion.

This assumes that Apple engineers are smart enough to do this intentionally. I suspect the problem is more due to incompetence than evil intent.

Domain registrars are another story. If you've tried lately to renew a domain name registration even with Network Solutions, the original registrar, you'll find it really, really difficult to just renew, without buying some additional service you didn't want. And once you do, good luck trying to get your money back!

Since if you had to use texts you'd still be paying and if you could use iMessage you'd always not be paying. So reducing price would still leave those using iMessage not paying you, and those still needing to use text just paying you less. I can see nothing to suggest iMessage would have had any impact on the price.

What the hell are you talking about? Text message prices became cheap (or should I say unlimited at no extra charge) on the mainstream carriers a long time before imessage came out.

Text initially was practically free until it became popular and fashionable for carriers to charge money for it because people were using less of their voice minutes as a result (they did this by enticing the less affluent and younger customers into cheap plans with very few voice minutes that had high per text rates, much in the

Initialy, NetScape cost about $30, but it was quickly discovered that browser technology wasn't that difficult to create. Prices fell quickly. Netscape, and that funny sounding browser called Mozilla were free. And as I recall, Mozilla was more friendlyer that IE; go figure that.

I started working for an ISP in mid '90s. At that time, we distributed Netscape (at a cost). When IE became available, we switched. to it. When it became bundled with Windows, our Intenet access kit went from 6 (3.x and 95 versions) floppies to 1, saving even more money. Bundling IE is what killed Netscape (in part).

Netscape was free for non-commercial use. I don't know what percentage of businesses were honest enough to pony up the money for a commercial license, but I guess it was enough to support them in the days before MS bundled IE with Windows.

Maybe they just charged for commercial use? Or maybe I'm confusing it with Mosaic? Either way, I'm certain that at a job I had before 1998, Netscape could be freely and legitimately obtained for use on Solaris.

And it WAS tightly integrated, Windows back then was a mess that made cooked spaghetti look tiny.

A Specific Example:

The Help system required Internet Explorer, to render documentation.Internet Explorer required the TCP/IP stack, to go to non-local pages.TCP/IP required the Help system, to explain what a DNS server, Default Gateway, etc. was.

Windows, pre-Vista was riddled with circular dependencies like that, where every piece depended on others in a loop.

Microsoft has been redesigning Windows since then in Layers, and no (new) module is allowed to have a dependency in a higher or equal layer.

So NOW, yes, they can flip IE on and off like a switch; but back then, it was an insane design change to make under the given time pressure.

And do you know how many Copies of XP 'n' (the one without IE) were sold?

Less than 2,000. Mostly by mistake, by people who didn't know what they were buying.

Noone actually wanted it, they just wanted to screw the big American corporation.

It probably would have satisfied the court if they had internet explorer disabled so that it couldn't browse arbitrary websites, Netscape was installed and Netscape configured as the default browser. All of which was easy for the end user to do. The deep technical issues are true but mostly irrelevant to the monopoly loss.

Netscape Navigator cost $49. Look at this article from 1996: http://www.fastcompany.com/277... [fastcompany.com]. Back when Netscape had as dominant a marketshare as IE later had. Note how the author seemed to just assume that a browser than didn't cost any money couldn't be any good.

Nowadays, Netscape Navigator has been forked a couple times and the surviving branch is called Firefox, and at $0 its price went down significantly.

The original IE did not come bundled with the OS, it was a free add-on. There was a version for Windows and a version for Mac at this point.

Fast forward to 1998: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001... [cnet.com]. January 1998, you will note. Windows 98, which was the first Windows that bundled IE in it, wouldn't be released until May 1998. So it would be difficult to argue that bundling had anything to do with it.

Later, Opera would follow suit, going from a price of $39 to also offering an ad-supported version in 2000: http://archive.today/201205291... [archive.today]. It only went ad-free 5 years later. At this time, people were getting sick of IE6, since it once was a decent browser (seriously!) but it had been stagnant far too long. However Firefox was starting to rise and it was taking all the people Opera could have gotten.

The original IE did not come bundled with the OS, it was a free add-on. There was a version for Windows and a version for Mac at this point.

IE 1 wasn't free it was bundled with Microsoft Plus! which was a bunch of pay add-ons.IE 2 came with OSes for free. At the time people saw it as a much worse starter browser used for people who rarely if ever used the web. Remember the internet was more diverse back then, it was quite easy to want to be on the internet but not on the web

It's usually an option in the UK, not across the board on all contracts. Mine gives me 100 minutes and 500 text for £22.50 and I have 1GB of data on top of that which costs another £10. I can almost certainly get it cheaper, but it would take effort and mean switching provider. I probably should do it at some point.

Apple doesn't make it hard. She just didn't follow instructions prior to selling her device and she hasn't followed instructions after selling her device to fix it. The hard part is pure fiction.

I find it constantly disappointing the repeated lie of "just works". The truth is this is only partially true even within Appleverse, there is no good reason why complicated workarounds are necessary. The fact that fruit lovers like yourself are prepared to defend, an anticompetitive move.

Personally I think this kind of bullshit is driving customers (like the one in the lawsuit) to android. You can only be abusive while your on top, and Apple peaked last year with market share; its devices are behind the co

Apple offers a UC system that is easier to install and configure than other UC systems. That's what "just works" means. It doesn't mean that if you turn a UC system on, don't bother to turn it off that it will magically know you don't want it anymore which is what the Android people suppose it should do. This would be like an article being critical of gmail for not disabling email when you sell your computer.

How is that the same? Gmail isn't affecting the working status of your other email accounts. iMessage likes to "take over" your text messages. If Apple wants to fuck with the SMS system offered by another company (your service provider), they need to make DAMN sure they don't break it in the process.

iMessage likes to "take over" your text messages. If Apple wants to fuck with the SMS system offered by another company (your service provider), they need to make DAMN sure they don't break it in the process.

e.g. have a mechanism such that if the SMS alternative is unavailable (for any reason) the sender switches back to SMS.

That is the default for the sender's phone. That is precisely what Apple does do for senders.

The recipients are complaining that their senders send them iMessages whicha) Some other device of their's is picking upb) The sender would be able to clearly see that their text message was pending delivery but not picked up by any device and then they would have a choice what to do.

Read this and the previous thread. This has been answered already multiple times. iMessages doesn't take over your text messages. People who want to send you SMS can send you SMS just fine. SMS continues to work perfectly.

Not an Apple hater, but I went through all of the correct steps to disconnect iMessage when switching to Android and had the exact same issues. Text messages wouldn't come through from iPhone users, at all, period. This is completely within Apple's control even if they aren't claiming it- the SMS protocol should always be used as a backup when iMessage transmission doesn't successfully complete. Otherwise, it's purely noncompetitive and is a maneuver to keep you on Apple's platform.

What a ridiculous statement. In some markets, SMS messages cost for each and every one a non insignificant amount. An iPhone user is notified if the iMessage is not delivered. You can also choose in the message settings on your iPhone to automatically send via sms if iMessage delivery failed. Some people wouldn't want that to happen so it is a user choice. Apple shouldn't be held responsible because some people are incompetent to read that their iMessage was not delivered.

Yeah, that's what I don't understand. So, she's suing because she can't figure out the iOS settings menu?

She sold her phone, so she hasn't got an iOS settings menu anymore. It's not obvious what things you have to do before you sell a phone. Maybe there should be an app for it - "Selling my phone" which reminds you of all the things you need to do before you sell it, does them for you if possible, and finally wipes the phone so the buyer can use it with their own account.

Next thing would be to go to some Apple support site. Which should be easy, but may be difficult for some. Especially if you use the old a

It was on the iPhone you got rid of. Now you have to go to support.apple.com and let Apple know you no longer want your old phone / number associated with your iCloud account. That takes about 30 seconds.

The people sending you texts though have the right to whatever behavior they want.

I've dealt with this issue for people at work, and it's enough of a pain that for business accounts you just pony up the extra cash for a new iPhone, rather than trying to explain to multiple clients why their text messages are failing.

I'm glad someone is suing Apple for it, because it's a terrible design to hijack SMS messages without explicit user permission - especially if you don't immediately switch back over to using normal SMS after a failed iMessage delivery. It should be automatic, or at very most one manual resend - but they require multiple failures to be manually resent before switching back.

I really don't understand why anyone would defend this behavior since transparently hijacking any type of data without permission is obviously a violation of user trust, and possibly a privacy issue as well.

You really sound like an Apple sales person. It's weasley to claim that a novice user enabling knows they've given permission to Apple to reroute their messages. For the handful of people that I've dealt with on the issue they had no idea.

You're also making a lot of things out to be obvious that really aren't. If you switch phones without disabling iMessaging (because you didn't know it was on in the first place), other Apple users will continue sending your texts via that route. The non-obvious fix is

iMessage users they can switch to a video call with facetime or use facetime audio all from within the messaging application. No, no, no... we aren't playing this game that users weren't told many many times what the difference is. My technically illiterate father understands that SMS (green) goes out a reliable voice radio available most anywhere while iMessage goes out a different radio that he only gets on major highways and population centers

but still everyone is going to say how people don't read emails from companies....

In the last ignorant rant about this posted just a day or so before this story, it was pointed out that their provider DID in fact send them an email that told them what they had to do when they switched phones.

At some point, the user has to actually pay attention to what they are doing and put some personal effort into it.

"Universal Communication" is an industry standard term of a communication system designed to access the user anywhere. The better ones are tied to PBXes which iMessage is not. So for example if X is trying to reach Y:

If Y is at his desk at home he gets notified at home via. a server applicationIf Y is at work he gets notified at workIf Y's cellphone can be reached he gets notified thereIf Y is at his mother's house with no cellphone the system calls her number (assuming Y checked in to let it know)

The only way a sender would be getting a delivered notice is if some other device picks it up. What you probably want is "read" which is a status to indicate that not only has at least one device gotten the message but a human has interacted with it in some way, If the recipient has that configured then the sender would be aware that the message was delivered but not read.

The way I understand it is that an iMessage can still be delivered to another device. I.e. if the user has an iPad or their computer set up. So when you send a message expecting it to end up on someone's phone they don't get it because they still have their computer setup, but if they never check their computer because they typically only look on their phone,.... how is iMessage supposed to know the message was not delivered?

By all accounts it's a common enough problem that other vendors offer guidance on

The people sending you messages are not sending you SMS, they are sending you iMessages. They are sending to your contact phone number, and they have iMessage turned on to save them $$$ when sending texts to other people registered with iMessage.

Because you used to have an iPhone, and had also turned iMessage on, your phone number is in their database, and so when it's deciding what data channel to use, it looks up the phone number it's about to send to, and if it's listed in the iMessage database, it sends

Why don't you reply to this post [slashdot.org] because that person seems to have tried to unsubscribe from iMessage.

Not really my job to give them a personally clue, above and beyond the above posting, especially since they are posting AC, and I therefore can't contact them to help them directly work around whatever it is they are functionally failing to do. As an AC, there's really no way to have a conversation person to person about it.

That person is an AC and claims from ACs about stuff with no explanation at all aren't worth responding to.

The fact is iMessage isn't magic. The way it works is rather clear. There are obvious visual signals for the sender about what's happening. There are no magic settings in it. Associating and disassociating devices can at a minimum be done via:a) The deviceb) findmyphonec) support.apple.comd) or via. Apple's phone support

As an IT Architect, who daily works with and for those with varying degrees of technical skills, I would disagree that the user is "an idiot". The steps you mention will certainly address the issue no doubt. What is in question is if the layperson should be aware of these steps and be capable of undertaking them "if" they forget to disable iMessage. What a class action lawsuit will do is force Apple to put in checks that look at the IMEI of the phone each time an iMessage is sent and the ack isn't received by the server from the phone in x amount of time. There is a different error message for an IMEI either offline or registered to a new user than one where the phone is simply unavailable. I can think of 5 different ways Apple can identify the device changed to a non Apple device. They haven't fixed this issue on purpose. Creating an issue like this undoubtedly ensures a percentage of users return their Android phones and get another Apple device to fix the texting issue thereby ensuring Apple revenue. You can bet Apple will weigh the cost of the suit versus the customer retention revenue and either pay out and leave it the way it is or fix the problem. There's no doubt it is a problem because it's not automated and the courts will rule in favor of the user because the process is not automated.

As an IT Architect, who daily works with and for those with varying degrees of technical skills, I would disagree that the user is "an idiot". The steps you mention will certainly address the issue no doubt. What is in question is if the layperson should be aware of these steps and be capable of undertaking them "if" they forget to disable iMessage. What a class action lawsuit will do is force Apple to put in checks that look at the IMEI of the phone each time an iMessage is sent and the ack isn't received by the server from the phone in x amount of time. There is a different error message for an IMEI either offline or registered to a new user than one where the phone is simply unavailable. I can think of 5 different ways Apple can identify the device changed to a non Apple device. They haven't fixed this issue on purpose.

Messages sent via iMessage are not sent that way on the carrier back end, they are sent on the phone, via the data connection, and the IMEI or ESN/MEID is not generally sent, as it would have to be pulled out and sent in-band as part of the message in a framed header for the message on the iPhone. This would require both a software update on the iPhone, and a software update on the back end iMessage service.

Given that the iMessage service predates the current generation of iPhones, and therefore the older

They could change the timeouts. If an iMessage is sent to a destination that's a phone number (instead of an email address), and a device configured to receive messages for that phone number has not checked in within the past 5-7 days, deactivate iMessage for that phone number until a configured device checks in again.

I agree this is mostly user error and haven't had any problems resolving it for people who've asked me about it, but people don't typically anticipate this result when switching phones, so co

SMTP has a method for returning undeliverable messages. It would be nice for iMessage to have this. I agree though. The litigation is absurd. You will still get billed if you move without cancelling your cable service. This same thing is happening here.

I ran into the same problem when i switched from apple to Android. Boss sent me a message i never got "hey, i was trying to get a hold of you earlier, what happened " This was in the early days of iMessage, before everyone really knew what was going on.

Even then, it wasn't that *hard* to figure out what was going on, and how to fix it. ( in my case i just put he sim back in and did it on the phone ) I dont think shes an idiot as much as she is a gold digger. Seems like that is the American way these days

I have an iphone. I never turned on any setting related to imessages. I still received imessages from other iphone users and would be pretty annoyed if the communication failed because of switching to a new phone.

It's turned on by default if you set up iCloud services, which people generally do to sync their address book, apps, and other content via "the cloud". That in turn is tuned on by default if you have push notifications turned on at all (which requires an Apple ID, and is how iMessage notifications happen, generally quicker than SMS notifications over the cellular providers networks (and the carrier bridge, if the sender and recipient aren't subscribed with the same carrier in the same geographic region).

Not only that, they is no indication that messages aren't being delivered.

There's a visual indicator on the sender's phone of a green vs. a blue "talk bubble" background color to indicate something sent via iMessage vs. SMS. Yeah, this isn't terrifically called out.

The notification will occur after the 45 days have elapsed (actually, it depends on when they run the batch job; it's generally 28 days +/- 14 days). But yeah, the notification is internal to the system.

I'll note for the record that SMS message delivery is also not acknowledged, so SMS messages, like iMessage messages, are pretty much like UDP datagrams, no matter how you slice things.

Poor setup on Apples part and clearly designed to hook people in.

I think it was more a cultural blind spot; in order to anticipate this being a problem, they'd have to consider the idea that someone might want to use a phone other than an iPhone, which is kind of unthinkable if you are an engineer whose livelihood is tied to building iPhone services... "Why in heck would anyone want to use software other than the software I wrote, which is the niftiest software evar?".

They have a settings mechanism on the iPhone that would take care of this, but if you dropped your iPhone in a toilet and killed it, you wouldn't be able to use that if instead of buying a replacement iPhone, ho used something else.

There's the online mechanism via appleid.apple.com, as previously noted, but I think that's a workaround. For number portability to another phone, which generally comes with a carrier contract and a new SIM (or a CDMA ID), they'd get the notification through the phone number portability act due to the carrier contract (this is half the source of the 45 days for the automatic cutover), but slamming the SIM around between phones that are iPhones and non-iPhones, there's really no network notifications that take place back to Apple that the change has occurred.

One possible workaround, and I will bet it's the one that gets put in place, should this suit be considered to have merit, rather than being a user error (it's definitely a user error, and Apple isn't really responsible for third party equipment not having the notification back to the Apple ID to dissociate it) would be to note failure to contact on the iMessage sends more promptly, and, worst case secondary settlement, probably retransmit them via SMS gateway.

This last is unlikely to happen, since it'd need to forge the source address as the original senders phone #, rather than the gateway, which would require additional agreements with all the carriers. I'm going to guess that the carriers won't be very cooperative in this, since they made about $10B last year in SMS charges worldwide, which is why Facebook was willing to pay $19B for "WhatsApp". Why cooperate with someone who is trying to disrupt your business model and reduce your profits, after all?

I'll note for the record that SMS message delivery is also not acknowledged, so SMS messages, like iMessage messages, are pretty much like UDP datagrams, no matter how you slice things.

One thing that SMS has going for it is the end-point is universal, and message delivery to the carrier IS acknowledged. Once the message is given to the carrier it will eventually get to a device if its turned on within a time-frame. The key here is that the target device is universal. My Galaxy S is in the toilet? Well when I unwrap my iPhone and put the SIM in I'll get my missing SMSes. Don't have time to wait, well if I pop my SIM into my 4G internet dongle I'll get the SMS on my PC.

iCloud isn't a storage solution. It is a an application synchronization solution. It has 4 separate types of synchronization designed to work deeply with applications. One being Core Data which they talk about all the time. Messaging is one of the things it synchronizes.email, contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, status of my browsers..., passwords, photos, documents and data from arbitrary applications... And one of the things is notifications.

Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.

A lot of people are posting that Apple had some sort of malicious intent (lock people in) when really it's more likely they just didn't think it through properly. The whole thing can easily be solved just by making a simple, easy to find webpage to turn iMessage off. Even customers who aren't switching may find it useful (abroad with your iPhone with data turned off because it's ridiculously expensive, but left the iPad at home a

This is a very real problem. My wife had her iphone 4s stolen and activated my daughter's old iphone 4s on her verizon line. About a week later she tells me that many of her friends are saying that she isn't responding to txt messages and she says she isn't getting them. This goes on for weeks. It turns out that she didn't turn on icloud on the new (old) iphone so all of the imessages were going to never never land. It's not obvious at all what is happening.

It turns out that she didn't turn on icloud on the new (old) iphone so all of the imessages were going to never never land. It's not obvious at all what is happening.

The first thing I would do after activating an iPhone on a plan to replace another one is sign into my iCloud account to sync all my contacts back. Not to mention remove the old iPhone from my iCloud account so my iCloud email, Safari bookmarks (and possibly saved passwords) are no longer in the thief's hands.

As a disclaimer i no longer use iOS products. There is plenty of 'bad' with iOS, but this isn't one of those times. iMessage was actually pretty cool, as like BBM it saved you from hitting your SMS limits ( if you have one.. ) and i think they were encrypted in transit.

Maybe because she switch from one chat messaging system to another. Quite a bit different than going from SMS to SMS. Now you can argue that that SMS and iMessage are two different systems. Well... they are in the same app, and it's confusing the hell out of users.

Regardless of the actual mechanics involved when one user experiences a problem it's PEBKAC. When multiple users experience multiple problems in similar ways all not expecting the outcome in question and vendors need to host webpages with dedicate

When I travel, I generally take a burner phone with me so I don't get overseas charges and otherwise. I still take my iPhone, but leave it on Wifi only. And a lot of times, Wifi is still hard to come by. I can get to internet cafes where I can log in to someone else's computer, but I can't get to my own computers. And when I do get wifi? I get all my messages, sometimes a week later.

The point? For a lot of us 1 day is way too short. Maybe 45 days is too long. What

Do you not understand the Apple way of thinking? There are few user preferences.

It may piss off the nerd aspects of me, but it also simplifies life when I'm not. Why? Because user pref here, user pref there, user pref everywhere and it never stops.

I use to design sounds for synths. A few hundred preferences to get a particular sound. I could almost deal with this because it was an art. And then I realized everyone else had this same preference at their fingertips but would rather buy the sounds and ne

Um, no apple did not prevent this. They prevented her from getting iMessages, which is proprietary. They have no obligation to figure out that you dropped apple, then magically forward them on via SMS when you ditch their 'services', and cant follow directions.

Their iCloud account isn't gone. It is still active and fully functional. That's like saying gmail is gone from the user's POV when they sell their computer. Apple's infrastructure for managing devices (i.e. websites like support.apple.com) aren't gone. The only role the phone plays in all this is they told Apple to associate a physical device with a phone number with their iCloud account and never bothered to tell them to not do that. Why shouldn't they have to switch stuff off? How are Apple's serv

I understand the difference but read GP's claim. GP's claim was that it was unreasonable for end users to understand the distinction between an account in the cloud and their client on a device. Apple sells their cloud services as part of the device strategy. Google gives away their cloud services and then sells data about you to advertisers. The analogy would be accessing gmail without ads and that Google would charge you for.

In specific. You can't access iMessage. Some parts of iCloud will work on W